ABWW Question of the Day: Are Black Women Being Punished for Seeking Higher Education?

In a recent study on the gender higher education gap African-American males saw some progress with their share of enrollment rising from 37 percent in 1995-96 to 40 percent in 2003-04, but African Americans still have the largest gender gap in enrollment with 60 percent of all African American undergraduates are women.

Many of the complains that show up on the why-black-women-are-single blogs is that we act too “ghetto.” If such a large proportion of us are college educated, how can this “fact” have any validity? College educated women have more income and fewer children, so how can we be materialistic, baby machines? If their is such a disparate gender gap in college then black men should have their pick of black women, yet they are they out-marry at much higher rates than educated black women.Marriage rates in the U.S. for college-educated women have risen enormously since the 1950’s why is this not the case for black women? Fewer highly educated black people having children means that they cannot pass on those advantages and knowledge and the entire community suffers.Mscnbc conducted interviews with a large number of black women, she found that community pressures on black women to marry black men can be more intense than the reverse. I say why is good for the goose is good for the gander. Sisters will have to try to bridge the gulf between them and non-black men. Although this is not a the be all and end all to the problem of hateration at least we can add a few percentage points of the current marriage rate of educated black women. Not all black women want to get married and are perfectly happy as single women but would be nice if this was a choice instead of a necessity.